Just a few things today.

The Network is the Computer

Kubernetes Distro Usage

If you’re interested in marketshare, usage trends, and benefits/problems in Kubernetes-land, Torsten and crew at EMA has a new stack of analysis and charts about Kubernetes out. It’s a packed 84 pages that tries to get it’s hands around the Kubernetes world through many, many different methods: surveys, analyzing GitHub, and even things like finding as many detectable Kubernetes clusters on the public Internet as possible.

Here’s one slide estimating the Kubernetes services/distros in use:

Check out the rest, for free thanks to my work, VMware.

Wastebook

• “Q: Female artists still have to sometimes use urinals backstage, because clubs weren’t built with women stars in mind. Joan Jett: Oh, I get very friendly with cups. I mean, [expletive] a urinal. That’s not clean. I’m just in my dressing room, with a cup. Quick, easy, you don’t have to go anywhere. Try it next time! Solo cup. Check that Solo cup before you drink. [Laughs]” Here.

• “Stuffing the prompt.”

• “Good morning, would you like a breakfast calzone?” On the DTW->AMS flight. (I said, “no, thank you.”)

• “Reverse sales.”

• “a group of vicious squirrels”

Relevant to your interests

• The Musk Algorithm - “Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.”

• Keep track of time in “metric time.” And, more explanation from Mike Olson. I saw him present (announce, I guess) this at Monktoberfest. Fun!

• Measuring Developer Productivity: Who’s Winning the Debate? - more from this weird nerd-fight about developer productivity metrics.

• How Dell Claims Apex Smooths out ‘Ground-to-Cloud’ Azure HCI Connections - Dell has a private Azure box.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Oct 10th, 17th, 24th talk series: Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Log Off

There’s now 700 of you subscribing - thrilling for me, of course!

If you like this newsletter, it’d be cool if you recommended it. I mean, come on, everyone who creates something like this wants as many people looking at it as possible. We all care about the numbers. And, thanks, for bringing some dashboard joy into my life.

Suggested theme song.

Just links and fun finds today.

Relevant to your interests

• VMware named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant - Nice spot for VMware in the MQ. // This is a pretty small market! Hopefully the market is selling around container management, the stacks of app dev support above it, and filling in all the Kubernetes gaps. I mean, that’s usually exactly how the infrastructure market works. // “The container management market has seen accelerated growth of 28.6% over the past year with a market value of $1.6 billion in 2022. The market is forecast to exceed $3.6 billion in constant currency by 2027, with an 18% CAGR.” And: “The business and technical benefits associated with container deployments are still mostly centered around enabling enterprise business agility and speed. Recently, more enterprises have commenced container deployments while seeking cost savings and defense against vendor lock-in. Both of these goals are attractive, but difficult to achieve with container deployments. In many cases, container deployments increase costs as enterprises add additional staff and technology assets. And although most solutions are Kubernetes-based, vendors add other components that make the entire technology stack proprietary, which often prevents portability, thus enforcing lock-in.” Also, some thinking on multi-cloud and apps best suited for Kubernetes.

• Work From Home Works - The man gets more productivity per buck from wfh: “So, we were shocked to find a massive 13 percent increase in productivity…. The productivity boost came from two sources. First, remote employees worked 9 percent more in minutes per day. They were rarely late to work, spent less time gossiping and chatting with colleagues, and took shorter lunch breaks and fewer sick days. Remote employees also had 4 percent more output per minute. They told us it’s quieter at home. The office was so noisy many of them struggled to concentrate.”

• Accenture’s full year generative AI revenues come in at $300 million out of a $64.1 billion total. There’s a long way to go, says CEO Julie Sweet - Assuming that at least half, or even more are, like, actual AI projects and just ones that involve AI stuff as a tool, this is still a lot of money for a year-ish old, mostly not enterprise-governance ready tech category: “Accenture says that its generative AI sales have doubled in the last quarter, adding $200 million in revenue to bring the total for the 2023 fiscal year to $300 million. Total full year revenues across Accenture came in at $64.1 billion.” And, they say it is, like, actual AI projects: “When we give you gen AI numbers, we’re being very clear it’s pure gen AI, so we’re not sort of talking about data and all of those things. So the real gen AI projects right now are still in that sort of million dollar-ish on average range. And we expect that’s going to continue for a while, right? That’s what we’re seeing because there’s a lot of experimentation.”

• An AI-assisted cloud? It’s a thing now, and here are six ways it’s already made my cloud experience better.

• The potential gap - People don’t use all the features in your enterprise tools, and that’s weird and probably self-defeating: “Which is kinda weird! If we pushed these tools to their limits, they could probably solve a lot of stubbornly persistent problems. Instead, it’s as though we’re hungry, go into a buffet, and never bother to walk past the appetizer station. We keep complaining about how we haven’t had enough to eat; new entrepreneurs keep creating new buffets that reconfigure the stations; we keep only eating what’s by the door, and declaring the restaurant insufficient.”

Path to Production Talk Series

My colleague Bryan Ross and I are doing a series of three talks on, you know, doing software better. They’re spread out over October, and if you’re reading this, you’ll like them - right? You can watch live or catch-up on the recording, just register already!

I have a new theory on all this “digital transformation” advice and chattering that I get involved in: you should actually do it now. When you look at the rates of people using CI/CD tools and survey reports about deployment cycles, it’s pretty bad after, like, 20 years. So, you know, if you’re not doing the basics of automating your full “value stream” (CI/CD), stop listening to us thought-leaders yammer on for six to twelve months and just go do that widely in your organization.

So much of what we’re all talking about is just that. So much so, that we often don’t even stop to ask: wait, do you have CI/CD in place already?

Our first talk is that topic. Register to see it for free next week, on October 10th. You can watch the recording, of course, once it’s out.

Wastebook

• “Whatever works is fine.”

• I ate some P.F. Chang’s orange chicken first thing here in the Detroit airport. There is no American Chinese food in Amsterdam - that I can find. That chicken is now a solid bag of concrete in my belly. It was delicious. NO REGERTS.

• “Doubling down on parallel SSH.”

• “It’s supposed to be ‘how to be nice,’ and it ends up being ‘how other people can be nice to me.’” Here.

• Woke up 4am, 4:30am Uber to Schiphol. First through passport line, in airport at 5:10am! (Woke up too early.)

• “Premium poultry concepts.” Seen on semi-truck somewhere between Brussels and Amsterdam.

• What if I prepared just for the work I needed to do, instead of also inventing and worrying about all the phantom work I make up?

• Giving the presentation gets easier, often fun, and sometimes even cathartic. The waiting to give it never does.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Oct 10th, 17th, 24th talk series: Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

I’m at the Monktober fest today and tomorrow. Portland is foggy:

Software Defined Talk #434

That’s the opening topic of our podcast this week. Oh, and we talk about a bunch of tech shit too:

Watch the video above, or just listen to the audio only, edited podcast.

Do Less

My colleague Bryan Ross has been writing up some tiny videos I made last year. They’re fun for me to read: he adds a lot of depth to what were, basically, just snarky asides in my head that I turned into 60 second videos. His latest is out, and you should read it!

In recent research, consultancy firm Deloitte reported that 70 percent of digital transformations fail. That’s a shocking number, for sure, but if you’ve been through enterprise-scale modernization efforts, you’re likely not that surprised. In this article, we’ll look at how you can build a robust business case for your change initiative by starting with realistic expectations, ensuring stakeholders are fully engaged, and structuring your delivery plan to maximize value.

Take a gander.

Wastebook

• “I’m shocked - shocked! - that stock buy backs are going on in this establishment! Ah, thank you, I see that my 401(k) has gone up in value.”

• Ever hopeful, I still put lettuce on my children’s sandwiches.

• Questionable stamppot joke in PowerPoint.

• I didn’t have money for a gift, so I just got you all of these screenshots.

• “it’s pretty boring to watch someone yell at a toilet about how bad they are at being a toilet” Here.

• “A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.” - Peter Medawar, Memoirs of a Thinking Radish, cited here.

• “You don’t have to like everything.” Yes, and as the Mann says of things that you don’t like or understand, well, “this is not for you.” Robert.

• 01: For your next three presentations, force yourself to not use slide titles. It won’t work for all slides - you won’t be able to resist the urge to use a title. You’ll be scared and doubtful. That’s fine, put a title on those slides. But, start each slide without a title, and try very hard to not add one. You should have at least half with no titles at the end. What do you notice? What do you feel? Now, present it.

• 02: I refuse to believe that any color other than black should be used for the text in presentations.

• 03: “What are you talking about? Sure, I used your conference presentation template. It’s just that I know how to edit the master slides.”

• No matter what I’m listening to, even if I don’t realize it, I’m really just hoping the next song that comes up in the playlist is something by Stevie Nicks.

• I vaguely remember how this joke goes: A: Is next Tuesday at 7am Eastern a good time to meet? B: checks schedule No, sorry, I’m booked then. A: When’s the next good time? B: checks schedule the next good time is…never.

Relative to your interests

• A Close Look at the Ray-Ban - If they work well, and I could my prescription lenses in them, I would totally buy these. The first generation for horrible reviews, though, so we’ll see how this one does. Here’s more details, and it looks like you can get prescription lenses: we’ll see if it’s easy to figure out in Europe.

• The radical idea that people aren’t stupid - Some triple-turns-out’ing here, all making a good point. // “correspondence bias, the tendency to attribute other people’s actions to their personalities rather than to their situations. You see a dude get angry and assume he’s an angry dude, rather than he’s having a bad day.”

• macOS 14 Sonoma: The Ars Technica review - I just don’t get widgets - in general, since the beginning of time.

• When it comes to creative thinking, it’s clear that AI systems mean business - The theory is that AI can generate more “ideas” more cheaply than human white collar workers. I feel like they’re likely just as good: just because a human comes up with a business idea doesn’t mean is good! This either means devaluing the humans (paying them less or firing them), or the alternate upside (which doesn’t always happen, of course): you do more of that thing. Imagine management consulting engagements done monthly, if not weekly. In the beat cases, this is what happens with software development automation and speeding up: you don’t keep doing the same amount of work and, thus, need less developers (pay them less or fire them), you get your existing developers to do more work! The downside for developers is that they rarely get paid a lot more: that value (extra money from selling more or driving down costs) is paid out to the executives and the shareholders. Workers of the world, demand your slice of EV!

• The Screens are the Symptom. - There’s a lot more going on in that book than just book burning.

• Software Delivery Enablement, Not Developer Productivity - This seems right. // ‘“Business leadership is always measuring revenue and pipeline, but that isn’t making its way to the engineering teams, or it’s not being translated in a way that they can understand,” she said. “They’re always chasing their tails about revenue, about pipeline, about partnerships [and] about investment, but it really should be a full conversation amongst the entirety of business, with engineering as a huge consideration for who that audience should be.”’ // That said, it requires a whole new set of instrumentation and a strong connection between software and the business. Us vendors know this because the developers are creating the product sold: more revenue from the product, the team is doing good. This kind of linking is harder in regular enterprises. But, I suspect that’s because no one has tried to do it, at least enough.

• Should You Care About Developer Productivity? - Things to focus on to make developer’s work better. Also, the old focus on outcomes no activities angle. // File under: the only people who don’t like metrics are the people being measured.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techcon, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Oct 10th, 17th, 24th talk series: Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

I'm considering pitching a new talk called "What's not platform engineering - AMIRIGHTWOOWOOHIGHFIVESPEWPEW."

Any takers?

I’m pretty sure I got all the slides and stuff done for my nutty week next week. Check back on Wednesday when I have a four hour layover in Detroit on the way to Monktoberfest.

The last time I was in Detroit, at the start of this month, this scene unfolded:

There’s a couple sitting across from me in the lounge, middle-aged. The wife is a bit tipsy and is trying SO HARD to get her husband to engage in fun banter with her.

She’s complained that they should be playing more Motown here in Detroit. She’s mentioned that about five times. Then she was like “do you realize we’re the ones who’ve been together the most of everyone we know?” And while he had asked her how many drinks she’s had a few times, he went to the bar and got her a glass of red wine.

Then this story:

Husband: That was Joe’s strategy: just drink two gin and tonics and pass out on the plane.

Wife: He needed to train more if it was just two!

Husband: …I found out later he owned a plantation in Kentucky. A tobacco plantation.

Wife: Oh, so he killed people.

Husband: Wait. What? He didn’t make them smoke.

Wife: Yeah. He supplied them…and killed them.

Husband: You’re ruining the vibe of this story.

After a long silence, a pause, she came back around, saying “I CAN’T believe they’re not playing Motown!”

And singing some to herself swaying her shoulders around.

I’ll report on anything that good that comes up.

Suggested outro.

Thought Leadership Hidden in Plain Sight

There’s a variation of The Plumber’s Problem that I suffer from: The Tech Marketer’s Problem.

When I see a new idea in tech bubbling up and I can smell the marketing strategy behind it (which, with my background, I usually can), I stop enjoying the, you know, story.

This becomes an anti-pattern when the idea and technology is actually good, and I grow suspicious and dismissive once I’ve smelled marketing and thought lording/ladying/theming.

Such as…

Recent examples are: Adam Jacob’s post-DevOps thought-lording (to promote how his new company does this), platform engineering (to promote Humanitec, and now all of us), and Steve Yegge on git sucking (he works at a version control company now).

In each of these cases, there are good ideas and technologies wrapped up in the marketing. DevOps did kind of drop the ball (so let’s wake it up and keep going). Now that we’re calling it “platform engineering,” the old idea of platform as a product seems to be catching on (thanks, Berlin!). And tightly integrating your dev, systems management, and infrastructure tools and stacks together can result in incredible dev and ops productivity (if can afford it).

But, with my jaundiced eyes, I have to spend a lot of effort to see past the marketing around all those great ideas.

Indeed, the best marketing is marketing a good product…but that is useless tactical advice (see most any marketing lessons learned from Apple). It’s the marketing advise equivalent of self-help and financial planning thought-leadering where the first step is “first, become a millionaire in your 20s.”

Beneficial Uses

The Tech Marketer’s Problem can be very beneficial early on in a technologies life before it has proven itself out. You can see this with Kubernetes.

Early on, even though there was a lot of interest in it, it was very, well, early. It was in the innovators and then early adopters section of the innovation curve. These are not phases of a technology that, like, a bank should get involved in…or really, any “normal” organization.

Seems like it’s fine now. (Hopefully for my bank!)

Sneak Attack on the Incumbents

However! There is a double turns out trap here: if you couple the over-hyping of a technology in the innovators and early adopters phase with an application of The Innovator’s Dilemma, you have the chance for lethal competitive surge.

Compared to the alternatives 5+ years ago, Kubernetes was under-powered and lacked a viable enterprise ecosystem. But, it was cheap!

In the developer (and DevOps-y) world, cheap means not just “low cost to free,” but it also means low friction to get started. Kubernetes was - and is - both of those. People ran around demo’ing installing Kubernetes in a 45 minute conference talk and deploying an app to it and scaling it.

All of the Day Two Operations counter-marketing in the world didn’t defuse that Day One thrill. Enterprise software is all about Day Two, where-as marketing new technologies like this is all about Day One benefits. This is a cunning use of The Innovator’s Dilemma crossed with some good marketing maneuvering.

(Docker was a better example of this: the Day One “mean time to adrenaline,” as people joked it, is quick when you start using Docker to deploy apps on your laptop. That is: trying it out is “cheap.” But, try to deploy those laptops to production in Day Two - hmmm…)

Avoiding The Tech Marketer’s Problem

I advise this:

1. If you are a marketer (or an executive at a tech company, or a enterprise sales rep battle worn CIO-type), be aware of this effect and catch yourself if you just automatically assume that anything in a press release or keynote talk is bullshit.

2. If you are part of a marketing strategy like this, very quickly go over your biases (or whatever), and focus on describing how real the technology is. “Hey, listen, I stand to benefit from the following idea because I work for a company doing it. But, just hear me out first as I explain the new idea…”

3. This has the added effect of nullifying your competitors hidden-marketing strategies: now the audience will be aware of the stealth-marketing technique and be wary of it.

And, look: I work in marketing. It’s like, my thing. I do all of this myself for a living. I do not think this stuff is bad or nefarious. A hammer can be used to build a house or smash a house.

Once you’re aware of a marketing tactic/effect like this, it’s just like anything else in the intricate enterprise software web of life.

Wastebook

• “The audience either really likes GitHub or Fireside Metrics are broken.” That’s what podcast metric analysis is like.

• “As it is free with Prime, I guess we will continue to have it.” Not the most thrilling product recommendation, but accurate.

• “Slides Benedict,” from Brandon. The post Mary Meeker Master!

• “If you can’t be happy with a coffee, you won’t be happy with a yacht.” Naval Ravikant, from here.

• “The world doesn’t need more of what it’s got.” Here.

• I’m considering replying to every email I get from procurement with “is this a joke? This must be a joke. This is not a very good joke” because, like, what are they even talking about? However, it’s always from an email address called do_not_reply@whatever, so, ok, but: I don’t think that’s how email works?

iPad Mini Update

The iPad mini continues to be good. I’m re-discovering/using Notes. As long-time readers/listeners know, I switch around my notes apps every 6 to 9 months. Notes and Bear have been in the rotation for a year or two. I like GoodNotes, but their recent version just bugs out too much with the pen - it used to be perfect! Notes is so close! I have two hang-ups:

1. It doesn’t use plain text files or markdown, and,

2. I can’t set custom background - I have scan of an old piece of graph paper that I really like using in GoodNotes.

But, Bear doesn’t do most of those either. Exporting from Notes is really terrible. Apple products are hardly ever built around the idea of batch exporting to plain text - whatever that is…uh…openness?

Anyhow.

I recently set the Lock Screen and wallpaper to Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Action and clutter-wise, it’s one of the more boring of the Bruegel’s painting. But, once you contemplate the name of the picture and think to ask, “wait, what? I don’t see Icarus in the sky..” you look around and see that he’s all but slipped under the water after falling - look in the lower right, up and to the left a bit: legs flapping up, some feathers floating down.

Meanwhile, you see the farmer and the shepherd in the foreground, both of them seemingly unaware of the fall of Icarus. The farmer is busy doing some real, normal shit. The shepherd is just staring off into the distance, away from where Icarus fell.

This feels like the multi-year shift I’m trying to have in my life: I’ll let the younger of you out there try to fly into the sky, now. I’m content to just till the fields, or, better, zone out amongst the sheep.

As with all good paintings, there’s an alternate interpretation, as explained by Wikipedia:

The shepherd gazing into the air, away from the ship, may be explained by another version of the composition (see below); in the original work there was probably also a figure of Daedalus in the sky to the left, at which he stares. There is also a Flemish proverb (of the sort imaged in other works by Bruegel): “And the farmer continued to plough…” (“En de boer … hij ploegde voort”) pointing out the ignorance of people to fellow men’s suffering. The painting may, as Auden’s poem suggests, depict humankind’s indifference to suffering by highlighting the ordinary events which continue to occur, despite the unobserved death of Icarus.

Interpret as you will shall be the whole of the law.

Relevant to your interests

• The story of platform engineering - Straight outta Berlin.

• iOS 17 Notes and Reminders Features - MacRumors - Hmmm! I think he only lacking for me is no custom background on Notes. Reminders might finally be good enough for project management? I think you could do some Kanban with the column view.

• The Fight to Repair - GPL thinking finally goes mainstream, eh?

• B612 – The font family - Font made for readability in cockpits.

• Kubecost Cloud Manages K8s Costs for FinOps Teams

• Stone Knives and Bear Skins - “When I attempted to debug the problem, I found that, unlike the tools I am used to in application development, the ones used to debug an OS are primitive at best. In comparison to my IDE and its tooling, the tools I had on hand to continue debugging had more in common with stone knives and bear skins than with modern software.”

• Microsoft Cloud hiring to “implement global small modular reactor and microreactor” strategy to power data centers - I’m sure this is something much less than “Microsoft to build it’s own mini-reactor,” but if still (and even more so if it is that): I don’t man, is this how capitalism is supposed to work? What’s next, Microsoft making servers?

• CNCF Survey Surfaces Cloud-Native Training CNCF Survey Surfaces Cloud-Native Training Conundrum - Skills are always a problem, IT staff is too expensive to hire, but do we spend a comparatively small amount of time and money to train people. No. // ’A global survey of 135 contributors published this week by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found more than half worked for organizations that don’t pay for training (53%), with slightly less (52%) also noting their organization doesn’t give them the time to pursue certification and training…. About 81% of respondents said cost prevented them from completing certifications in the past two years, while 43% cited time as a limiting factor. Cost and time were the top two constraints for training, selected by 62% and 36% respectively.’

• Confessions of a Viral AI Writer - An intriguing strategy thought in here: what if the AI writing tools are not for The Writers, but the readers. Readers are able to make good enough (or great!) stories on their own. You could say this cuts out the writers, but maybe it just means readers have more to read. Or it cuts out and guts the human writers. Technology!

• Should You Measure Developer Productivity? - I should read this in more detail, but, I think the answer is “yes, just don’t be a dumb shit.” That McKinsey PDF really got the danders up! Coté’s Metrics Law: the only people who don’t want to be measured are the people being measured.

• ChatGPT & Friends: The Cool Kids boosting my productivity - Om’s toolchain for people who think in text.

• 3 questions to get unstuck and start making progress - 1. What haven’t I done yet? Why? 2. What’s stopping me from doing this? 3. What is making me frustrated or discontent?

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techcon, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Oct 10th, 17th, 24th talk series: Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

As you can see above, a lot going on next week. Plus, this week I’m try to work on those webinars.

Today I took about half the day off due to one of those mysterious "is it a cold? is it a flu? is it just allergies? or am i just being lazy?" sickness-episode. My dad raised me with the mantra “you don’t get sick, you have a strong constitution.” One, he did not play Dungeons and Dragons, he just liked using big words. Two, this is mostly true.

I need a sickness to either be obviously debilitating before I believe it. This in-between, sniffly nose, stare into the void of your eggshell colored ceiling bullshit is…bullshit.

Videos!

I finally got a good handle on what Backstage does today - not the outcomes it helps you get, but what it’s base, core capabilities are. Ben gave me a nice overview of the basics and let me learn-by-questioning a lot. Hopefully we’ll get together for two more parts: talking about the plugin ecosystem and then how you install, run, and manage it. There’s a podcast, audio only version if you don’t care for videos.

The Prisoner's Dilemma of Cables (in a Family Household)

If you meticulously keep track of your phone charger and laptop cables and wires in a family, everyone else will know that you always have the right cable.

They will stop caring to keep track of their own, losing them constantly. There’s probably no “stop” for the younger ones: it can seem like they never started in the first place!

Then they will come to you to "borrow" your cables. Which they will promptly lose. And then, there you are, with no cables.

So, why keep track of them in the first place?

Software Defined Talk

The three of us were together this week:

This week, we discuss why everyone is envious of Google’s Internal Dev Tools, examine the state of Git, speculate about how 37 Signals plans to reinvent software licensing with ONCE, and share a few thoughts on the Salesforce CEO’s recent comments about work from home.

Watch the video, or check out the audio-only podcast episode.

Relative to your interests

• The Power of a Path-to-Production Workshop - The lines are more important than what’s in the boxes.

• A Guide to Open Source Platform Engineering - The New Stack - ‘“In its simplest form, a platform is just the underlying set of services and capabilities that an application requires to run effectively in a production environment,” Johnson said. Platform-driven automation makes it really easy to do the right things and really hard to do the wrong ones.’

• What Predicts Software Developers’ Productivity? - As ever, better vibes, better work.

• What I learned in year three of Platformer - “the newsletter business three years in is that to be successful, you need multiple things to go right at once: to have the chance to work with a great partner; to generate scoops at some regular cadence; to create a complementary product that expands your audience; and to leverage whatever platform dynamics you can for as long as they last.” And: “thanks to the death of Twitter, it’s harder to promote your work: you wind up posting the same link to five or six new networks, and collectively get a tenth of the views that a year ago you could have gotten on the bird site.”

• The Eclipse Foundation Releases 2023 Jakarta EE Developer Survey Report - “When comparing the survey results to 2022, usage of Jakarta EE to build cloud native applications has remained steady at 53%. Spring/Spring Boot, which relies on some Jakarta EE specifications, continues to be the leading Java framework in this category, with usage growing from 57% to 66%.”

• Restricted Source Licensing Is Here - This is the best advice for buying from any startup/high growth mid-stage company, especially the open source ones: “Review your vendors’ financial health. One of the big concerns with such events is the financial health of your OSS vendor. What if it goes under? The potential loss of the platform will necessitate a search for alternatives, including the potential support of an open source alternative. New open source alternatives based off forked, older source code will take time to develop and may not provide the same experience in terms of adoption, support, and feature upgrades that were experienced with the original.”

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techcon, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Oct 10th, 17th, 24th talk series: Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

I haven’t given you a D&D update in awhile. I’ve had the chance to play one of the many solo adventures out there, Solo Skirmish: The Cult of Mol'goroz. This is a very different approach with some at first clunky mechanics, focusing mostly on just combat and rolling for random finds, traps, and puzzles. But, it achieves its goals: it’s fast and action oriented. You have a one page, three part adventure that goes through a four part loop. First, you read the brief overview. Then you roll on a random table for 20 occurrences (anything from finding something, falling into a trap, or some actual story telling). Then you roll for a random encounter (goblins, etc.). Then depending on which stage you’re in, you a level-boss or boss fight, basically. As with all solo systems, there’s some variation here and there, but that’s basically it.

Fighting isn’t really the part of D&D that I like, I like the role playing. But! ChatGPT is pretty good at the role playing part and terrible at the action/combat part. It’s very hard to get ChatGPT to actually advance the plot and make decisions.

So, in the back of my head I’m still trying to come up with an approach to using ChatGPT for solo D&D gaming. The Solo Skirmish system feels like a good skeleton to build it on. You would run through the rigid, action/combat sequence in the printed adventure, and then there would be points where it would say “tell ChatGPT to now play a conversation between you and the guard. Pass ChatGPT this context about the guards…” That’s the kind of thing ChatGPT is good at.

I’ve also been experimenting with getting ChatGPT to come up with outlines for solo adventures (choose your own adventure format). It seems promising. You can give it a premise (a “hook”) and it can kind of come up with branching “go to page 7 to eat the meat-pie, or if you’re vegetarian, go to page 54.” We’ll see.

Rick Rubin’s Podcast

I like Tetragrammaton podcast a lot. (It’s one of those big deal podcasts that doesn’t actually have it’s own home page, which is totally weird - just search for it in your podcast listener or YouTube).

Why? One, it is luxuriously long, Rick Rubin really gets everything out of the guests. Two, he asks great questions: at first they seem naive and simple, but then you hear the answers and stories and you realize how great the questions are. Coming up with and asking questions that get great answers is very difficult.

I think most of his questions are either asking “how?” as in “how do you choose an album cover?” or “how do decide if a joke is good?” His other frequent question is “what was that like?”: he likes asking people in advertising or adjacent industries “was it really like Mad Men?”

If you’ve seen that meme that’s like “how a person looks at a bookshelf” versus “how a carpenter/artist” looks at a bookshelf," he’s always doing the second.

He’s just so chill too.

He very rarely has anything negative to say. You leave each episode pretty much feeling great and optimistic.

As an exception that proves the rule: in one interview you hear him almost putting down executive types at record companies who are more interested in selling than creating good content. He says, they don’t know what they’re doing. But that’s about as far as the negative vibes goes.

Some of the episodes are a little weird if the people he’s interviewing don’t have much to say. I skipped over some two part series of, you know, magic powder doctors early on.

The content is good, and long-term there’s some kind of world-building going on that’s attractive. He’s building a world of curiosity, creativity (even “art”), all bound up in a world-view of just chilling the fuck out.

I mean, he’s rich and famous. We’re hearing from the rare exception to the thousands of producers and creative types that didn’t make it big. But, if you can put aside the accurate but boring Halo Effect criticism, it’s good stuff.

Also: the ads he has are fun to listen to and many of them are super-weird (nutrition-scammy) products. Macadamia nuts? Powdered imitation-gatorade? But, the actual ad reads and production are fun!

Wastebook

• We’ve passed a fuck-line here in Europe. I’ve seen the word “fuck” on more surfaces than ever: t-shirts, for sure, laptop stickers, on cars. I feel like it’s still spicy talk in the States, but overhear it feels like part of the general European trend to just like, well, not give a fuck.

• “Clarity first, then consistency.” Here.

• Three groups of people were playing cards in the Zadar airport. Is that a Croatian thing? Who ever plays cards anymore?

• “The Church of Recurring Revenue.” Here.

Have you tried just following best practices?

Don’t let the factory rust.

• Why and how cloud native technologies give you more control over your software delivery process? A rough answer: Cloud native apps are modular, container-based designs. They run in container orchestration engines and, it is hoped, have much of the infrastructure and networking stuff automated (though, this is yet to be fully realized and creates a problem in its own). Assuming the happy path: they're designed to be efficient to run, fast to deploy, and decoupled. This means you get more cost controls and more agility. What's important, though, is to standardize on how you do this.

• Much of what you probably suffer from now is having to deal with a whole bunch of different ways of developing, managing, and running applications, tech debt, and having to spend time manually doing compliance and security checks. "The business" and developers don't have enough cycles to study what users actually need, experiment with the best way to solve it, all while making sure they comply to internal standards and regulations. Doing all that "not the actual UI" work (moving pixels on the screen!) takes a lot more time than you ever think. One person in banking estimated that amount of toil at 50% to 60% of their team's time.

• Before we get to any of that, though, you need to make sure you’re thinking of software as a core part of how your organization runs. Here’s a simple test: who decides what your developers do? Are they given requirements and “wire frames” from another group and given a date to hit? This probably means you’re doing it wrong. Are they told what you need to accomplish and why those goals are important for “the business,” and then they can decide how to deliver those “outcomes”? You’re probably closer to good software culture.

• No matter what tools you use, if you follow a command-and-control approach to software, your results will be less than ideal. People know this is lean manufacturing: you push the work closest to the people actually doing the work. It’s no different in software, and, in fact, is even more so. With software the developers and operations staff are both working on the line and building the factory at the same time. They should be the ones determining what to do.

• Eventually management can take a bigger role as they become more like developers, or understand how software works. In tech companies, many of the founders and executives are (former) developers, so they of course know how to manage and get results from developers and operations people. Is that the case in your organization? What is management’s background? The board?

Relative to your interests

• A new way of thinking about open source sustainability - If you’re using open source components in your IT stack, don’t forget that long term reliability and stability is costly, and worth paying for.

• “We gave a profession of bullshit generators access to GPT-4. You won’t believe what happened next.” - If the work you’re doing is predictable - in this case, a lot of the junior level work at management consulting firms to come up with new strategies and GTM - the AI can help. The positive side: if you’re considering getting the consulting firms to bootstrap your annual planning, try a week with ChatGPT instead and see if it feels the same. Then don’t hire them, as much? Also, the AI is good at hype-marketing.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techcon, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Oct 10th, 17th, 24th talk series: Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering Oct 12th Spring Tour London Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

I have a week and half before I travel again (see above) - and then it’s a doom-doozy of a travel week, plus more travel to follow. And, as you know, outside of the talk you’re giving or the meeting you’re having, very little gets done during work-travel. There’s also a series of three webinars in the works. And, I need to create/learn a new talk or two during that time. Meanwhile, there’s other macro-winds on the horizon way above my pay grade.

It almost seems all undoable! I wonder if that’s why I’ve been feeling more anxious than usual of late…

I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my annoyances working with experts/practitioners (well, anyone) over the years: they’re always telling me they don’t have time to take on new work, their backlog is full. And, I’m like, “I just want to record a podcast!” Turns out, you can just say no. Is that a way people work? Could I just say “oh, I have travel upcoming, a three webinar series, and then I need to make at least a podcast a week, and can you imagine how long it took me to type up that rant on analyst reports (a lot shorter than you think because I basically took one pass and didn’t edit it - but you get what I’m saying), so I can’t do that podcast”? Would my life and bank account be better? Would my work be better? Would my employers finances be better? At a startup…no? But at a regular company?

There’s something to be said for calibrating on “only work on things that matter, that have impact.” Which, I guess. But I also feel that in a big company, you hire a lot of people to do work on the mid-tier “impact.” The management/work advice we all soak in from startups and “high growth” companies seems hardly applicable to, like, the real world.

I have no calibration for those things. It’d be nice to have some, though.

(Also, I just ordered an iPad mini - I didn’t realize they had that size with the Apple Pencil. I love using my big ass iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil, but I rarely do it. Could this mini get me over that edge. In theory, it’s also the perfect form factor for Kindle books and even PDFs [I think you’d have to landscape the iPad mini and scroll through the PDF instead of going full page, but that’s probably fine]. My main concern is, like, protecting the pencil. I need to find some kind of tape on hard-case that I can have for when I want to do the whole throw the iPad in my bag things. However, the main scenario I’m targeting is a go-bag with my video recording gear [tripod and iPhone mount with hot-shoe, Rode Wireless II’s, various cords] and the iPad mini. Throw in a little foldable bluetooth keyboard, and this feels like a good setup for trips where I can leave my laptop behind. The only thing I really need a laptop for is editing slides, probably? I think you can record podcasts and even present from iPhones and iPads. THE DREAM.)

“We gave a profession of bullshit generators access to GPT-4. You won’t believe what happened next.” - If the work you’re doing is predictable - in this case, a lot of the junior level work at management consulting firms to come up with new strategies and GTM - the AI can help. The positive side: if you’re considering getting the consulting firms to bootstrap your annual planning, try a week with ChatGPT instead and see if it feels the same. Then don’t hire them, as much? Also, the AI is good at hype-marketing.

A new way of thinking about open source sustainability - If you’re using open source components in your IT stack, don’t forget that long term reliability and stability is costly, and worth paying for.

The infrastructure drives the app architecture

A cloud native applications is typically designed as a bunch of little components that coordinate with each other over a network. They may use events instead, and while that isn’t the same as point-to-point network communications, it follows the same idea: you have a bunch of indepedent-ish bundles of code that work together, as needed, instead of just one big chunk of code that does all the work. This is, you know, a distributed application. “Message passing” is one of the dreams of object oriented programming and Internet apps.1

Microservices!

Why you use a service mesh

Anyhow, if you’re do all of that, you need a way to manage all that network traffic. Each little bit of code has to know how to contact the other bits of code and work with it - so called “east-west traffic.”2 You need a registry that catalogs all those bits of code. You need to know information about that chunk of code: the version, how to connect to it, how to authenticate with it. You need to somehow make a call over the network, that is, get a network connection. You want it to be secure and encrypted, like, always now-a-days (I don’t really know what mTLS is, but EBC decks are fucking rife with it, so it must be great). And then the people running that network want to manage it: if some chunks of code are too chatty and filling up your series of tubes with too much crap, you want to throttle them. You want to gather metrics about your series of tubes and the messages sent down them. You know: network management. And, when you’re using it with Kubernetes, you want it to all think like and work with Kubernetes: how you configure and deploy it (yaml!), how configuration is rolled out and drift is done. Etc. Etc. (Check out Ivan McPhee’s service mesh overview for a lot more details and the vendors in the space.)

What drives me bonkers about this is that, like, this is what the Internet does. Why don’t we just use Internet primitives to do all of this? Why do we need to layer a whole new network management layer on-top of all the layers. Even more maddening, when you go up the stack into the application layer: the developers there have written all of their own stuff that handles all this functionality. You look at something like the projects in Spring Cloud and they’re, you know, doing all of this too. I’ve started to think that each of these layers happens because the people in the layers above you don’t want to talk with the network admins.

Anyhow, back to service meshes. They are handy! They do important things! For example, help you run your applications across multiple clouds, Kubernetes clusters (is that the right phrasing?), add in customized layers of security, and so forth. Big ol’ enterprises need all of this. I mean, everyone does.

So, what’s up with the whole category of service mesh? Well, Gartner is not so hot on it:

The hype around service mesh software has mostly settled down, and the market has not grown as much as was once anticipated. This raises questions about the usefulness and ROI of service meshes for most organizations. “Market Guide for Service Mesh,” August 2nd, 2023, Gartner.

The report notes that service meshes are used outside of Kubernetes as well. It’s like a whole new marbling of a layer around and inside your existing layers, be they VMs or containers. Yay…? Ivan’s take a little less dire, simply urging taking it slow before choosing which service mesh to use:

Avoid adopting a service mesh based purely on consumer trends, industry hype, or widespread adoption. Instead, take the time to understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Explore the potential tradeoffs in terms of performance and resource consumption. Evaluate your support requirements against your in-house resources and skills (many open-source service meshes rely on community support). Once you’ve created a short list, choose a service mesh—and microservices-based application development partner—that works best with your software stack. Ivan McPhee, GigaOm, August 2023.

Filling in the gaps

When I first head about the notion of a service mesh long ago, my first reaction was basically “wait, I thought Kubernetes already did that?” This was the first in a long series of that reaction over the years. It turns out Kubernetes didn’t do a lot of the things I assumed it did. This was an instance of confusing outcomes with capabilities: for all the praise Kubernetes gets for improving operations and developer productivity, I’d assumed it, like, had those capabilities. But, in fact, many of the outcomes Kubernetes achieves are done by layering in all sorts of other projects, products, and ways of working.3 Ivan’s report does good job cataloging all those capabilities: your eyes can start to glaze over after awhile, so be sure to read the vendor profiles in reverse alphabetical order!

So, you need a service mesh to get all of that basic, distributed app functionality. This is fine! That’s how Kubernetes was designed, whether the overall community over the years treated it as such or not: “platform for building platforms,” “a life of it’s own,” and all that.

That Gartner report identifies a key trend in the ongoing rollout of Kubernetes. People don’t want to pay for things, and this leads to a lot of unplanned for work on their part of integrate all the free components together and deal with them:

The current service mesh market is largely dominated by open-source offerings such as Consul, Istio and Linkerd. However, Gartner client inquiries about service meshes consistently show open-source service meshes suffer from difficulty of use, and a lack of sufficient skills for effective engineering, administration and operational upkeep. The lack of mature DevOps practices can increase the operational burden. These challenges substantially increase as the number of deployed container pods and services grows exponentially, especially in a multicloud environment.

Hey, you get what you pay for. For vendors, this does mean one important product management and strategy decision: you need an easy to download, easy to get up and running, and totally free on-ramp to your paid-for product. I mean: that’s just late 2000’s, open core and early public cloud basics, right?

That Gartner report is good reading if you have access to it.

On your radar

I’m guessing you don’t have access to Gartner, so you’ll probably be interested in this GigaOm report from Ivan McPhee (have I referred to it already here yet?), which you can read thanks to my employer VMware. It’s equally good, though not as strident. Here is their radar:

We also discussed the services mesh concept and space on last week’s Tanzu Talk podcast (podcast or in video form-factor). Also, check out this interview about service meshes on our podcast from July of this year.

Relative to your interests

• Second Wave DevOps - The tools keep changing: “Let’s face facts: our implementation is what’s letting us down. What worked for John and Paul in 2009 is, in broad strokes, exactly what we have been asking every single DevOps practitioner to do since. We’ve replaced all the individual tools in the system multiple times (look at the CNCF Cloud Native Landscape for the evidence): less automated infrastructure, more infrastructure as code; less monitoring, more observability; less data centers, more cloud; less svn, more git; less virtual machines, more docker; less capistrano, more kubernetes; less hudson, more github actions. The problem isn’t that we haven’t optimized each individual part of the system enough. We’ve built more efficient tooling at every step. But the way the whole system is put together? The experience of using it? That’s basically identical to how it was in 2009, and it’s the reason we’re stuck.” There’s two fronts to the “DevOps is dead” rhetorical war now: from the platform engineering crowd and the fraction within the DevOps crowd itself.

• Did I Make a Mistake Selling Del.icio.us to Yahoo? - Plan to never get past slide one: “Any decision was an endless discussion. I remember once, we had to present to a senior vice-president. We had a 105-slide deck prepared, and we didn’t get past the second slide because they ratholed about one fucking slide. It was a miserable environment.”

• iOS 17 release: everything you need to know about Apple’s big updates - A concise list. The journaling app comes out later this year.

Survey: Majority of US Workers Are Already Using Generative AI Tools, But Company Policies Trail Behind - “The new survey finds that 56 percent of workers are using generative AI on the job, with nearly 1 in 10 employing the technology on a daily basis. Yet just 26 percent of respondents say their organization has a policy related to the use of generative AI, with another 23 percent reporting such a policy is under development.”

Logoff

I was at SHIFT in Zadar, Croatia this week. I presented my platform talk on a huge stage! This was an arena and the stage was on the center, you were surrounded by the audience. That’s not normal: usually, the audience is all in-front of you. When I’m presenting, I tend to pick out three or five people in the audience that look at. You, of course, want to pick out people who are smiling and paying attention to you. They give you energy, and also help you figure out if your approach and content are working. In this case, I forced myself to circle around the stage, finding those people in all directions.

If you find yourself “in the round” like this, try to move around so that you can find more of those positive vibe people.

Also, the morning of I had some kind of anxiety attack. You know, the kind where there’s nothing to actually worry about and yet it feels like there’s everything to worry about. It wasn’t about speaking at all. In fact, I was looking forward to finally getting up there because I knew it’d drive out that general panic attack thing. And, it worked! Public speaking is a safe, calming space for me.

Did I Make a Mistake Selling Del.icio.us to Yahoo? - Plan to never get past slide one: “Any decision was an endless discussion. I remember once, we had to present to a senior vice-president. We had a 105-slide deck prepared, and we didn’t get past the second slide because they ratholed about one fucking slide. It was a miserable environment."